A novel foot interface versus voice for controlling a robotic endoscope holder

In traditional minimally invasive surgery, a camera holding assistant is required to provide a view of the operation site for the surgeon. The surgeon's performance relies on the quality of this video footage, which is sensitive to surgeonassistant communication errors and the assistant's fatigue or inattention. Thus, we propose a novel foot interface to give the surgeon direct control over a robotic camera holder to replace the human camera holding assistant. The foot interface should allow the surgeon to control the camera while their hands are occupied with the primary surgical task. It can control 4 degrees of freedom of the camera's pose at 2 speeds. A preliminary experiment consisting of representative endoscope control tasks was conducted to evaluate and compare the performance of the novel foot interface and a voice interface using Google Cloud Speech. The foot interface performed better than the voice system in average completion time and error rate, with lower cognitive burden. Participants found the foot interface intuitive with a natural mapping between the foot and the robotic arm movements. The command actuation process is simplified and optimized to reduce the physical strain to the same low level as the voice system based on the subjective assessment after each task. Subjective assessment showed that 95% of the participants thought the foot interface provided better control of the camera movement and 90% preferred using the foot interface over the voice interface.